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Prof. Bazon Brock

‘Playable Pictures’ (SpielBilder)

Introduction to the exhibition, May 1977 

Galerie Bornhold, Hamburg

Not only Play Material

When Michael Buckler presented the first finished examples of his ‘PlayPictures’ to experts and art collectors a few weeks ago, there was a surprising reaction: general enthusiasm. Such unreserved approval is surprising because experts and collectors had reacted to analog attempts by other artists with extreme restraint for years: The quality of the prints lagged far behind that of original prints; the material of the image carriers was too fragile; and finally, the concepts were not convincing, as the image programs offered so far were limited to geometric form repertoires. Even Vasarély's worldwide rénommée could not help his PlayPictures to gain recognition. Gerstner's or Tinguely's attempts to keep the picture programs permanently variable by means of a mechanical drive remained marginal phenomena, as the cooperation between the picture machine and the viewer's activity was too much dominated by the picture machines in their offerings.

Prof. Dietmar Kamper

‘Psychology today’

Beltz Verlag, 4. Jhrg. 1977 

Vol. 12, S. 68-74

The PlayPictures of Michael Buckler

“I have thought of painting a picture that is a kind of trap...” wrote René Magritte. The artist Michael Buckler has realized part of this idea. His playful pictures invite the hands and the eyes to grasp.

At first you want to look past them. They don't immediately catch the eye: Michael Buckler's ‘work’n play pictures’. One senses the difficulty one has with the “modern” in art. Then a call comes from somewhere: the figures in the pictures are movable, you can play with them! – which triggers a timid experimentation, a shifting, swapping, confusing of elements. But one remains in the picture, perhaps tasting the power of pure inversion: A man standing on his head on the tip of a leaf, a woman constantly falling off a chair, a plate balancing on an apple, and so on. 

The question arises: is it possible to go from one picture to another...? If you try it, you will come up with so many confusing combinations in such a short time (for example, man in plate on woman's chair or apple in frame at the end of the path or woman with folding rule hovering over plate) that in the confusion you will give up the game for the time being in order to – possibly – think about its rules.

The possibility of intervention marks the beginning. The artist has refrained from completing the picture. The last part of the way to the finished picture can (and should) be covered by the viewer himself – by playing. The play test is fun. The hand can confuse the eye. The eye in anticipation encourages the hand to make ever new strokes. The ambivalence of one's own power and the resulting “craziness” of the pictures is still somewhat under control.

Aesthetic context. 

Michael Buckler's PlayPictures (work’n play pictures) combine three different modalities of the space experienced by people (exterior space, interior space, object space), each with three figures that can move freely in this space. A man, a leaf, a cube “belong” to the exterior space (= landscape); a woman, a chair, a frame to the interior space (= room); an apple, a plate, a folding rule to the object space (= tablecloth). As far as the depicted subject is concerned, we are dealing with three of the most important traditions of Western panel painting: the landscape, the interior and the still life (which in France is evocatively called “nature morte”). Their constellations of meaning also remain stereotypically conventional: the man outside, walking on his way into an open, uncanny world; the woman inside in a closed home, standing (waiting?); the things stored on cloths and in bowls.

But each picture has a tense or even disturbed relationship to this tradition. In the still life, in addition to the usual elements (apple and plate), there is also a measuring stick that does not fit in and, moreover, is almost obtrusive because of its strong color. The interior is reduced to a minimum of symbolic allusion: all that remains of the splendor of conventional interior decoration is a chair; the picture frame is empty; the woman's posture is turned towards the outside, i.e. towards the bare, windowless walls. The landscape painting is the craziest: the man walking away from the viewer on a country lane through a meadow is accompanied by a leaf (in natural size and color) and a geometrically precise grey cube, i.e. no stream, no bush, no tree, no animal, no house.

It is true that the pictures can still be defined as traditional on the basis of their proportions and viewed as variations on a single spatial experience (namely the modern one): The “nature morte” of the apple, the plate, the folding rule on the checkered tablecloth is of “natural size”; the room inside is proportionally reduced in size throughout; yet even the landscape painting has a disturbed order: in it appears the “nature morte” leaf, which also belongs to the space of things in terms of color, and the cube, which is not subject to any concrete dimensional order, but could come from the pale interior in which the woman lives because of its dreary exterior view.

The approval of Michael Buckler's ‘work’n Play Pictures’ shows that, on the one hand, he has succeeded in avoiding the shortcomings (print and material quality are first-class) and, above all, that he offers a new concept: the user is put in a position to actually create pictures independently that go beyond the results of design courses for do-it-yourself hobbyists. Based on surviving statements by René Magritte, it can be assumed that Buckler's works are so well conceived that they penetrate to the very heart of Magritte's pictorial concepts – and that is saying something; indeed, it seems that Buckler not only thematizes Magritte's process of image creation here, but also makes it comprehensible. Magritte's process essentially consists of shifting the context of meaning in which a pictorial element exists in the expectations and ideas of the viewer, and the context of design in which a pictorial element was placed by the artist's work, step by step, i.e. experimentally.

The artist himself has thus formulated the principle that allows the play to go beyond the individual picture frame – and to leap over it. From the confusion of the proportions, everything else can be mixed up: the interrelationship of the elements, thing and person, abstract and concrete, inside and outside, and even more so the meanings associated with them. Once challenged, an initially indeterminate combinatorics emanating from the hand manages to affect the specific semiotics that bind the eye to traditional and conventional ways of seeing. The dizzying trial and error violates the habits of experience and orientation. On the one hand, there is the threat of fatigue, and on the other, the need to understand the situation.

Combinatorics versus semiotics. One must assume that the eye of our contemporaries is barred, that it no longer reacts sensitively due to too much knowledge. Light and shadow, theme and outline, figure and perspective still come to mind, but the outside is no longer perceived. The constructs of meaning with their nuances of meaning, which centuries of human socialization have worked on, not least European panel painting itself, are also part of the “grid work”.

They rearrange the gaze, bind perception to the predefined and enclose almost every adult in a world that is as ready-made as a prison. The desert of abstractions reigns. It dazzles from within. Seeing is no longer perceiving, but an isolation torture effective through the conditioning of the sensory organs, which stereotypically completes an identical autism of individuals in a thousandfold repetition, empirically proving the doctrine of the monad – conceived at the beginning of the modern era. Sensory illusion has become constitutive through abstract “meaning” without regard for the particularities of life.

A subsumption of sensuality under the single “meaning” of the utilization of everything and everyone that pushes for totality separates people from their reality and makes them compliant for purposes that they, as shut-ins, cannot dream of. Since then, the dispute over the primacy of reality and illusion has been settled.

PlayPicture ’Denkpause’, 1977

24 color screen print on paper, metal

and magnetic foil, 70 x 57 cm

Buckler's PlayPictures challenge the picture user to constantly re-establish this balance of asynchronous meaning and design of the picture elements. His interventions are not arbitrary, but are controlled by his imagination – even if he is not aware of the contexts of meaning of the picture elements. It must therefore be of interest to the image users to find out what connection could exist between their feelings and moods on the one hand and the newly conceived images on the other. To do this, however, one would have to document one's own use of images over a longer period of time by taking photos of the individual image inventions and providing them with information on the respective state of mind of the image user. Such field experiments, which artists make possible for us, are certainly no less significant and helpful than those of scientists who have been using analog methods – for example in psychology – for a long time. You just have to have the courage to take yourself seriously as an image user, i.e. to actually use the images for yourself: a surprisingly rare ability in today's image users. People are all too ready to cede their interests as users to the artists; no wonder that even outstanding works of art then degenerate like dead decorations on the walls.

Without the decisive instance of the senses that have not atrophied, reality remains fictitious, generalized fiction is the only reality. The organized flood of images of modernity can be cited as material evidence of such a fictitious reality or real fiction, which also has a “compelling” character. The sheer total obsession of the gaze through advertising, magazines, film and television signals the dominance of fabricated patterns of meaning, the power of a normalized and normalizing semiotics that not only bends discrepant experiences, but also tolerates alternative schemata, provided they are abstractly opposed. This is where the difficulty of a sensual critique of desensualization comes from.

Experience of the outside. 

In the attempt to account for this process of abstraction, which places the human world under the dictate of a total immanence, art, especially painting, has also been involved. Whether by way of a desperate anticipation of experience reduced to immanent thought structures or by reflexive refraction of the destruction of human nature carried out with the help of man himself, the artistic process was in any case under the particular strain of a continuous disappearance of the very experience from which it springs and on which it is dependent. It is no wonder that since the end of “auratic art” (Benjamin), the intended endeavor has increasingly become a document of the impossibility of art, like a race for life and death. The way back to perception, to an experience of the outside, thus seems to be blocked.

The fact that painting is in a particular crisis under such conditions, has to do with the extraordinary role of the eye: it is the dominant sensory organ par excellence, the organ-subject that is indispensable for the subjugation of the objective, but also the most susceptible to illusion and imagination, and the most easily duped. Without the groping hand that grasps, it is virtually at the mercy of deception. The systematic destruction of sensuality therefore depended on separating the eye from the hand. In the tradition of panel paintings since the end of the Middle Ages, this separation has been going on, the subjective appropriation of the world in the separate spaces of experience has become increasingly illusionary, the subject “eye” ironically revokes its imagined constitutive role, first by renouncing the generality of seeing, then also by the depicted reflection of the captivating laws of vision, and finally by a self-criticism in the form of the disavowal of its function of domination.

Interactive Art

‘PlayPictures’ of Michael Buckler

Art Basel, Solo-Exhibition 1977, Poster

SpielBild Edition, Trilogy, 750 Expl.

Buckler's PlayPictures – her repertoires – are meaningfully calculated: The three variably usable elements of the picture unit are sufficiently differentiated to open up several contexts of meaning simultaneously to the most diverse picture users; on the other hand, the variable picture elements to the invariable picture spaces are sufficiently uniform to allow the many possible picture inventions to be experienced as finished, self-contained works. After all, this is still what matters, namely that the individual pictorial inventions of the picture users can be seen as independent creative contexts; they are not just play material.

        Bazon Brock

Bazon Brock, Ästhetik als Vermittlung

DuMont, 1977, ISBN 3-7701-0671-7

www.bazonbrock.de

As seeing renounces its generality – at the time of the desacralization of painting – the interpretation of the respective meaning of what is seen becomes necessary. In the long term, this leads to the doubling of facts in image and word. The theory of art and the history of art emerge; the ultimately exuberant power of commentary begins here, has a manifold effect and creates the internalized semiotics of experts from which art has not been able to emancipate itself to this day. It attempts to do so in painting (in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century) by thematizing its working method, by reflecting on itself as a medium of perception and by bringing this reflection once again onto the canvas, which soon “tears” under such strain (cf. the ritualization of such “tears” in happenings and performances).

The surrealists (already in the middle of the 20th century) chose a different path: They give food for thought by upsetting the laws of seeing, the habits of seeing, which are anything but natural and are influenced by traditional painting: deliberately violating perspective (a still recent achievement of the eye), confusing the orders of things and people (practiced and appropriated for only a few centuries), but above all opening up the doctrines of meaning, the “codices” from the pure immanence of corrupt senseless, senseless experience.

Eye and hand. The reconstruction of anthropogenesis has proven the fundamental constitutive significance of the eye-hand field for human perception. Perception is no longer mere reception, but a mixture of seeing and acting, of contemplation and concept, of eye and hand. In the long run, it only functions under the condition of intervention in the field of vision and the visibility of the field of action.

Accordingly, the perceived order of things in space can only be understood as the result of social efforts, produced in long-term epochs of active and suffering interaction with things and people. For some decades now, this order has been spelled out backwards, not least because its low resilience in an unproductive time is puzzling.

Because something threatening has broken into the ready-made world of the normal Central European. The order does not hold: madness lurks behind the prescribed constructs of meaning; the apparatuses of utilization are beginning to run empty; a mad uprising against the desensualization of man and the world has begun; the still ongoing subsumption of the particular under the general is increasingly coming up against blockades; even on the surface, things no longer fit together and in space; the interiors of apartments degenerate into projection staffages; the landscape regions rise up against centralization; a peculiarly subversive effect emanates from the post-modern arts; the radical division of human experience ultimately forces an understanding of the extent of destruction across all habits of thought, disciplines and subjects.

Where seeing and hearing are so completely lost, action must be taken on a trial basis and trial action must be discussed. The context dependency of the reduced senses is so massive that lateral thinking alone is not enough. Incommensurable actions are required, both seriously and for fun. In general, one should remember to play. Play is one of the few creative sources for the uncircumcised productivity of the human senses.

Context-breaking combinatorics can therefore fall back on playing with the hands without having to ascertain the meaning in advance. Nevertheless, the link between the eye and the hand is still so unsettling that only joint efforts are promising. All too often individuals, including artists, fall by the wayside in fear for their identity, overtaken by the power of semiotics.

After all, there is no longer any question that the step taken by the artist Buckler leaves the defined area of the fixed meaning of a fictitious reality or a real fiction. At the same time, however, it leaves the realm of “art” in the sense of an activity for which the individual is responsible. It leads to a place where, if possible, everyone can play along.

However, with regard to Michael Buckler's play images, a regaining of the perception of all is “surplus”. The intended transcendence of experience also transcends the picture surface on which the hand plays tricks on the eye. It must be recognized that the hand here inevitably plays with what is seen, with figures that are cut out of the visible, which is the subject of criticism. The space that exists in a threefold modality has been turned into a surface, has been shortened by the depth that the game ultimately requires as a combinatoric.

Panel pictures, including the play pictures discussed here, are in principle subject to frame constraints; however, measured against what is at stake, frames are reductions of spatial complexity in accordance with the eye. Thus the images that, by playing with them, play along with you, can at best provide markings of a boundary that first the hand and then the human eye must cross backwards. Without such a restrictive relativization of their function, they would (like some of Magritte's cleverest pictures) merely be effective as advertising, i.e. connected to the machinery of exploitation, against which they oppose on the level of intentionality. Therefore, it is not the images that really cross the border. In reality, the border can only be crossed by people at play. But these people need pathfinders like Michael Buckler's PlayPictures.

        Dietmar Kamper

Universitätsarchiv Freie Universität Berlin

Findbuch – Prof. D. Kamper

Über die Spiel-Bilder von Michael Buckler, 

S. 50 u. 92:

www.fu-berlin.uniarchiv.findbuch.kamper.pdf

www.cultd.net/kamper

www.cultd.net/kamper/texte/autor.htm

www.cultd.eu/kamper/texte/buckler.htm

With kind permission

of the textright holders Solveig Kamper

und Signe Kamper

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Interaction in Art

Variable Elements: multicoloured screenprints on magnet foile (meter in his originalsize)

Bazon Brock, Work biography 

'Invitation to intervene in visual worlds of SpielBilder von Michael Buckler’, 1977 ff.

https://bazonbrock.de/werke/detail/?id=54&sectid=2979#sect